I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness: A Novel by Claire Vaye Watkins (2021)

Ten-Item Edinburgh Post-Natal Depression ScaleMy sister visits and asks how much a doula costs. Does a person really need one ( Read more... )

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (2022)

Chapter Five: Late August
Several people mock-groaned or whooped, followed by a smattering of applause. Zoe checked her phone; she had been there less than ten minutes. For the first exercise, Kyle asked the group to go around the semicircle, each person shouting out how they felt in that moment. ( Read more... )

Joan Is Okay: A Novel by Weike Wang (2022)I read somewhere that empathy is repeating the last three words of a sentence and nodding your head (3 ( Read more... )

Something Wild: A Novel by Hanna Halperin (2021)

Part IISTRADDLING NESSA ON THE HOTEL BED, Tanya has not been this physically close to her sister in years, probably since that day in their mother’s bathroom fifteen years ago. When she feels on Nessa’s cheeks that her sister is crying, Tanya pretends that she doesn’t notice. The danger of getting ( Read more... )

Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth (2013), translated by Charlotte Barslund (2020)As I was putting away in my basement lock-up some saucepans that couldn’t be used with my new induction hob, I came across an old diary from 2000. The diary had been a Christmas present and I had written in it for a few months before I got bored. As I hadn’t ( Read more... )

Other People's Clothes: A Novel by Calla Henkel (2022)

Chapter 2
I had finally built up the courage to bring in one of my assemblage sculptures to the pit. A hulking, piss-stained, most likely bedbug-infested piece of plywood that I’d found on the Bowery. I drilled hundreds of holes in the warped board, and with silver wire I’d carefully threaded ( Read more... )

Tides by Sara Freeman (2022)

This is the cheese counter and this is the cheese wire and this is the scale and this is the wax paper and this is the twine. Here are the scissors; they’re dull as a butter knife. These are the good wines and these are the less good wines. These are the whites and the reds and just the very best rosés. No, we don’t do ( Read more... )

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (2010)

2006: Introductory
This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between ( Read more... )

The Terrible: A Storyteller's Memoir by Yrsa Daley-Ward (2018)

ONE
8.8
All I can think is,
Beauty makes everything bearable (38).

10.1 Beauty makes people stay, I thought. Beauty makes people listen to you. Beauty makes people fall in love with you and not know what to do with themselves. It was in all the songs and it was in the Disney films. ( Read more... )

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead: A Novel by Emily Austin (2021)

Part Three: Ordinary TimeI find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people. I feel like I am falling through space and Eleanor just threw me a rose. It’s such a sweet, pointless gesture. It would be less devastating to fall through space alone, ( Read more... )